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Micheal Nauenberg: Professor of Physics, 1966-1996
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Michael Nauenberg, Professor of Physics: Recollections of UCSC, 1966-1996, is the edited transcript of a single interview conducted by Randall Jarrell on July 12, 1994. Nauenberg received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960. Prior to his appointment as a professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz in 1966, he was an assistant professor at Columbia University and a visiting associate professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Stanford University.
At UCSC, Nauenberg served as department chairman of physics from 1970 to 1972,
and again from 1983 to 1985. He was instrumental in developing both Stevenson
and Crown Colleges, but in 1973 shifted his focus to building a graduate program
in physics. He also founded and served as the director of the Institute of Nonlinear
Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Nauenberg’s primary research interests are in particle physics, condensed
matter physics, and nonlinear dynamics, and he is the author of numerous publications
in these areas. His most recent work is on a new quantum mechanical treatment
of neutrino and neutral meson oscillations and on the dynamics of wave packets
in weak external fields. He has had a long standing interest in the history
of physics and mathematics, particularly during the seventeenth century, and
published about a dozen articles on the works of Hooke, Newton and Huygens,
and several reviews of recent books on Newton's Principia. He has a particular
interest in the history of physics and has helped to bring historians of science
and physicists together.
In this oral history narration, Nauenberg shares his impressions and critical
evaluation of UCSC as an experiment in public higher education, particularly
the tensions between the college-based model and the pressures of the faculty
tenure system within the large research University of California system. He
points out that the founders of UCSC appear to have overlooked or underestimated
the demands building graduate programs would make on faculty members’ time.
He discusses faculty appointments in the physics department, as well as other
key faculty members on campus. He provides a sweeping and cogent assessment
of the strengths and achievements of the physics department, and describes the
struggle to establish the very successful Santa Cruz Institute for Particle
Physics, as well as his frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful political battle
to attract the Institute for Theoretical Physics to UC Santa Cruz. This oral
history is an invaluable and insightful historical contribution by a senior
faculty member with an extensive and distinguished history on the Santa Cruz
campus.